The Confederate Army of Manhattan was a group of eight Southern operatives who attempted to burn New York City on November 25, 1864, during the final stages of the American Civil War.
In a plot orchestrated by Jacob Thompson, the operatives infiltrated Union territory from Canada and made their way to New York. On Friday night, November 25, beginning around 8:45pm, the group attempted to simultaneously start fires in 19 hotels, a theater, and P.T. Barnum's museum. The objective was to overwhelm the city's firefighting resources by distributing the fires around the city.
Most of the fires either failed to start or were contained quickly. All the operatives escaped prosecution except for one, Robert Cobb Kennedy, who was apprehended in January 1865 while trying to travel from Canada to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.
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Famous quotes containing the words confederate army, confederate and/or army:
“Well, you Yankees and your holy principle about savin’ the Union. You’re plunderin’ pirates that’s what. Well, you think there’s no Confederate army where you’re goin’. You think our boys are asleep down here. Well, they’ll catch up to you and they’ll cut you to pieces you, you nameless, fatherless scum. I wish I could be there to see it.”
—John Lee Mahin (1902–1984)
“Well, you Yankees and your holy principle about savin’ the Union. You’re plunderin’ pirates that’s what. Well, you think there’s no Confederate army where you’re goin’. You think our boys are asleep down here. Well, they’ll catch up to you and they’ll cut you to pieces you, you nameless, fatherless scum. I wish I could be there to see it.”
—John Lee Mahin (1902–1984)
“Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own,—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)